When I was a poor student I pirated everything. Music, software, games, you name it.

Now that I have a good stable income, I pay for the things I want because I want to encourage artists and developers. But corporations and capitalism are ruining it all.

So, I'm changing my habits. Paying money where it actually has a significant impact on the creators, (like going to live concerts and shows, buying albums directly from the artist or from their own site, buying indie games from small studios, going to watch movies from studios that respect their employees and artists and unions) and pirating the ever loving shit out of everything else coming out of a large corporation.

I paid over $1k about 10 years ago for music software. My computer killed itself, so I made a new one and redownloaded the software...but the company said I'm an imposter. After years of fighting with them, they refused to activate my paid software despite proving my identity and showing proof of purchase. I didn't choose to pirate, the system chose for me

First time, it was because I was a kid that couldn't pay for the movies/music/games I wanted. The high seas provided me with a solution for that.

Then I started making money and Netflix streaming came along making it both cheap and convenient. I docked my ship and forgot about my pirate life for a long time. Everything was good, living a quiet life...

But then the corporate greed caught up and ruined everything. Streaming prices became absurd, content got fragmented to way too many services and they fucking started introducing ads.

So here I am, setting sail once again. I didn't need or want this, but they have forced my hand with their infinite greed.

Wanted a game. Was too expensive. said "fuck it" and set sail.

I didn't have money as a kid. I still don't have money.

Cable installer guy came to the house one time... Hooked up internet and asked me if I was going to Torrent or not. I had no idea what he was talking about as this was 2005.

Did some googling canceled my cable subscription and I never looked back.

Got off the The seas when Netflix was big... And then all that changed again..

So here we are again.

Corporate greed.

Are we counting like Ares and Limewire? I just wanted to listen to music and could never pay it. That turned into software I wanted but couldn't buy. Then I stopped for a while and started up again years ago not wanting to pay for streaming

Subscriptions, subscriptions everywhere

I love sea men, and free stuff.

Convenience. Well, nowadays that is. And I only started again after the enshittification of streaming services started. I buy all my games legally, just motion picture that I get from the seas.

As a kid/teenager it was more about the money. We cracked games to play on LAN parties without everyone having to have a (retail) copy etc.

TLDR; It started as a young teen who just wanted to get games for free; It continues because companies don't give two flying hoots about me.

Currently, I pirate because I can't rightfully give any money to these anti-consumer companies that will only victimize me. I can't own anything anymore, and this absolutely frustrates me. If I could own the media I purchase, I wouldn't pirate anymore. (by this I mean I wouldn't pirate the media I consume. I'd still data hoard because it's a literal addiction, please help!!)

I don't pirate games anymore; or better said, I rarely pirate games, and when I do they're ran in a VM with VFIO because I really don't like the idea of running arbitrary code on my system; even though we have reputable, vetted, and trustworthy groups. (As a general rule, I don't trust what I can't verify.) I buy all my games on Steam for convenience, and I opt to use Goldberg's Steam Emulator (which is open source!!) to store backups of my games, and this setup works wonderfully! I stay away from games with invasive DRM like Denuvo (I play these in a VM), and I've long stopped buying EA and Ubisoft games. The only forms of media I pirate nowadays are movies, and music (and the occasional game).

The first time or the second time?

The first time was because I was sick of paying the "Australia tax" for new releases that took longer to reach us than most of the rest of the world. The second time was due to subscription fee hikes with associated reduction in quality & range of content.

I think it was a game that needed activations to play and I ran out of activations or something. Predictably, pirating it was the better experience in every way.

Ironically mine started without nefarious connotations.... The family computer in the mid 80s was a minor novelty to me for ages, only good for simple text games really. Then...

My brother grabbed a cracked game toward 1990 off a BBS. The game itself I don't even remember, but it had a cracktro that stunned me. Graphics I'd never seen, actual music out our little adlib card... Was crazy enticing.

Being stuck in the Midwest US while enamored with DemoScene is a hell of a drug. Every few kb down that modem was like crack.

That then opened a new world of games as well... Things my older brother had no interest in. Things my parents obviously would not have allowed. You know... The Good Shit ™️.

Obviously once codecs caught up video and audio quickly became a thing. My closest buddy and I would burn stack after stack of CDs to take a spindle at a time over to share between us and others.

Then the data hoarding set in... What good is just having these shiny things for yourself when you can share? True joy doesn't exist without spreading it to others.

The sickness persists... Stronger than ever despite becoming a pessimistic old man. Multiple gigabit connections: check. 200tb arrays just for torrents: check. Seed times tracked in years: check.

Remember when 14.4k was the most epic thing for grabbing those disks at lightning speed? I certainly do.

I went back to it recently. It's mostly down to Amazon deciding that paying them was no longer enough, you had to watch their ads as well.

Well now I don't. I installed Jellyfin, paid up for two years of VPN, and got another HDD. I'm set. I'm all done with asking nicely for a better service so I got my own.

I sub to Spotify because it's easier than pirating. I'm a creature of convenience. If there was one streaming service that had all movies that have already had their cinema run, and all TV shows, and was all in one UI, and nothing ever got taken off it, and it was a reasonable price (say the price of two current streaming services), I'd probably pay up for it.

But there isn't. They don't want to offer it. They all want to be king of their little corner.

The pirates innovated and made content available long before the corporations did.

Before streaming services took off, it was the only way to get movies and music (besides some IRC rooms). There were even a few golden years where movies would get leaked to torrents in full quality, before the theatrical release.

Music too was easier to find on napster, limewire, and torrents, than your local music store.

In the early 00s I pirated a lot of music, but now I buy records and pay for streaming because it’s affordable and good.

I used to pirate software but now I just use FOSS because it’s free and good.

I used to pirate games but now I just wait for steam sales, which is cheap and good.

I used to pirate lots of movies and tv shows but then got a Netflix account and it was reasonably priced and good… until it wasn’t. Then I set up a full stack of usenet/ sonarr/ radarr/ overseer/ Jellyfin and boy oh boy is that good.

But now I have a baby and don’t watch tv anymore so I pirate pretty much nothing.

Crazy prices for movies and software like Photoshop. I'm still subscribed to YT Music, but I have to pirate music as silly wars between labels and artists result in music being removed from streaming services from time to time. For the same reason I don't want to buy movies online - we don't own shit.

My childhood home only has dialup Internet. First year at college I found out someone ran a DC++ instance on the network and it was over from there. I got a 2tb HDD because I had to, and could, download enough movies/shows to last me the summer. I stopped for a while when I moved out and actually had broadband, but then Netflix stopped being Netflix and became $NFLX, and with all the other services popping up I heard the call of the seas again

I lived in Japan when streaming was becoming a thing. Everything was region blocked, and DVDs were (and still are) horrendously overpriced for what you get.

I've been sailing the high seas, or at least skirting the shores, since the late 1980s when my classmates and I were swapping BBC Micro software on 5¼" disks! Moved onto PC in 1990 and carried on. I even cracked a few games back in the day :-) These days I don't pirate so much, and I have quite a collection of legitimate music and software.

My mom showed me what Limewire was when I was a kid. She didn't know what piracy was.

I'm honest so I will tell the truth: I like cheap stuff.

I was poor. Pirates selling copied disks on the street was all I could afford

I was a truck driver, driving long distances, long hours. I was listening up to 4 audiobooks per week. Audible only offered 4 books per month.

Ideology. every cent a capitalist doesn't make because of me is a small victory.

I live in a kinda poor country, the money for a game can be used for 4 or 5 days of food, that is with regional pricing. Otherwise it's a whole month. That and also it's satisfying to give back to the people, KB by KB copies get to new owners that will enjoy them.

Was just trying to watch the original Star Wars from when I was young and found out that it is simply not available for sale. My money is no good! Then I found this Project 4K77.

For me it was the Simpsons when I was a kid and a relative would record it off satellite TV for me. It just carried on from there. I started recording stuff off TV myself, recording music on audio cassettes and eventually copying VHS tapes.

Then I got a PSX console and my parents "knew a guy" who burned games.

After that I heard about Napster and started downloading MP3s on the family PC. When Napster was shut down I moved onto other apps like Kazaa and Limewire.

Then I got a DVD burner. At first I just copied DVDs but when I got broadband I started downloading torrents and burned the files to DVDs.

About 10 years ago I started storing those files on a NAS. Planning on moving to Jellyfin in the next few weeks.

It was the early days of the internet and I liked Metal music.

To get me some legal Metal I had to catch a train to the nearest city for like a half hour trip, then walk around to the tiny metal shop and hope they had the CD I wanted.

And I did that. I bought a CD a week from the local store and went on monthly trips to the City.

But I also got them off torrents. Sure it may take a week to download a track but that meant just leaving my PC on.

So I built up a collection. I copied the CDs I bought. I made track lists of the best songs and made my own compilation CDs and took them to work at Deep Pan Pizza, and we would put them on while throwing pizzas at the customers.

I ended up with a DJ case of copied CDs which is still on my loft. They weren't all downloaded, but copying media is Piracy, and I made CDs for my friends. Fartknocker Volumes 1 and 2 are still talked about by my old friends because they were full of Bangers.

Now I have a Spotify Family account and every few months they add a quid onto the price. The other day I put on The Global News podcast by the BBC and it had adverts in it! I pay my licence fee for the BBC, they don't do advertising. Pisses me off.

So now I use Audiobookshelf for my podcasts. Currently I'm curating a music collection I've pulled from my old iPod in my car. Not sure it's feasible to replace Spotify but I can try

I had the Soldier of Fortune original game disk, but lost the box with the CD key. Mailed the devs/publishers asking for help, sending a picture of the disks, and they basically told me that I should have been more careful. Googled "soldier of fortune CD key" and ended up on one of those now-defunct websites which collected cracks and CD keys, discovering that not only you didn't need the key, but you could also just download free stuff.

Now I pay for Prime Video, Netflix and Spotify and buy lots of games on steam/gog, but I also created an app used by thousands of people every month to help them sail the four seas

Censoring in computer games. Here in Germany, a lot of games were censored aggressively when I was young, because God forbid the youth is able to play games in their original form! They will turn to the dark side when they see some red pixels! Politics got even worse when we had a school shooting incident (not that regular here) and the attacker played a video game.

A lot of games where either not available at all or we had robots, green blood or missing assets in them.

I also liked to listen to electronic music (still do), but I grew up in North-East Germany and the only radio stations here played pop, rock and old people music. Couldn't tape techno music, was too poor to buy it (and too far away from a good store anyway), so I looked on the web and found a lot of great stuff.

I still remember the first online music stores, with horrible DRM and 128kbps WMA files...it was not a good time.

For a while I had Netflix and Spotify, almost didn't pirate anything anymore. Then Spotify started draining my phone's battery, they didn't shuffle properly anymore and I got recommended songs that were definitely sponsored (fuck you, A State of Trance). Netflix lost a lot of content and we got many more streaming services in return. So here we are again.

I was in middle school and I saw my friend had all the episodes of ATHF (aqua teen hunger force) and I wanted to be able to get free episodes of stuff. Silly but true.

You can therefore blame the mooninites for my piracy.

My wife and I were piss poor and getting finance degree at a third rate state college. I was paying my way with PC support. One day I spent money I didn't have to buy a Wndows NT certification book and used the university's T1 line to pirate NT 4.0 for myself and MS SQL and Oracle 7 for my wife (I also bought a CD of Red Hat Halloween). Almost thirty years later we literally saved a presidential election and are the ones keeping significant parts of the US infrastructure from falling apart. All thanks to piracy.

As a lil boy of 8, I wanted computer games but I never had a fast enough computer so if my parents ever did buy me a game, it often wouldn’t work or would be too slow to play.

Fast forward to wifi in the house and I got San Andreas working on my IBM T42. Good times.

Originally, I was too poor to afford software. Then my CD/dvd books were stolen and I couldn't afford to replace the media I'd been collecting my entire life. I bought an external drive, an s-video to RF modulator, a Bluetooth keyboard and connected my computer to channel 3.

Eventually Pandora and Netflix were released and I stopped pirating. I spent most of a decade buying all of my media. Then I tried to buy a complete set of Good Eats and it wasn't possible.

There was literally no way to purchase every episode legally. So I took the $500 I was going to spend on that box set and put it towards an ebay'd server and some drives.

By the time the streaming wars started to gain steam, I had everything automated, and was pushing 50TB of storage.

Was a student, couldn't afford CDs.

Nowadays I

1. don't want to subscribe to too many streaming services, each just having a few things I want to watch. Also I broke my neck and I'm now on disability, there's no budget to waste, at all.
2. Like to watch old shows and "rare" movies that aren't available anywhere.

Shitty quality content/software/products. Now I pirate everything I need and if it's good I pay to the developer.

Walking into CD shop and buying album was something I couldn't afford as 15y old

I lived in china and it was the only way to access loads of media. When I got back I saw the hellscape that streaming had become. We recreated cable. That and not owning anything anymore. So I still sail the high seas. Even if I wanted to pay the high price of 30 different streaming services it's a better more enjoyable experience sailing.

Everyone just copied everything from each other. Floppy, then Twilight CDs. Then came the internet and exploring music there was better than sitting around waiting for a song to come on the radio to quickly press record. It was normal when I was young to share, not really an active choice.